The court decided that the logos are not protected works within the meaning of German copyright law. In its assessment, the court concurred with the prevailing opinion in German legal literature, which focuses on whether, despite the software-controlled process, human creative influence is still exerted. Copyright protection is therefore conceivable as a result of human involvement in AI results, which means that the output needs to reflect the personality of the person who prompted the AI.
The decisive factor is whether the prompting expresses creative decisions in an independent manner by making free and creative decisions and thus also giving the output a personal touch. It is necessary that the use of AI be closer to a tool than an independent creative entity. These requirements are met if the creative elements incorporated into the prompting dominate the output to such an extent that the work as a whole can be considered an original creation of its (human) author. If, however, the creative “decision” is left to the AI based solely on generic, non-specific instructions, this does not represent an expression of the human user’s creativity and is therefore not a copyright-protected work.
In the court's opinion, the logos in dispute did not meet these requirements. The logos and the prompts used to create them did not demonstrate any creative expression on the part of the plaintiff. The specifications in the prompts were largely limited to general formulations that did not have a sufficient influence on the creative process or the output. Rather, the plaintiff had largely left the creative decision to the AI which dominated the creative process.